SOCIOLOGY AND THE EPIC 269
of the Iliad are taken up almost wholly in describing the glorious adventures of certain great heroes. The man of the people is treated with scant courtesy as compared with the prince ; in war times he is to have no individual will of his own. Still, this is not necessarily an over-preponderance of the military spirit. All early peoples, except perhaps the Phoenicians, were led by the conditions of existence to submit absolutely to military jurisdiction, particularly in time of war, when power must be lodged in the hand which was strong to defend or to conquer. Some military bias might be conceded in the case of the Iliad ; and yet upon examining the power of the king, who was the war- chief par excellence, we find that, even in time of war, mili- tarism was glad to range itself on the side of the popular will. The center of gravity of the system of rule, in time of war, lay in the council of chiefs ; yet chiefs and king were guided largely by the approval or disapproval of the whole people, convoked in assembly. Before the people the king was often censured and humbled.
Many other facts might be cited from the poems of Homer to show the singular freedom from bias, religious or other, which renders the Iliad and Odyssey capable of presenting a universal view of the civilization in which they rose. It is also true that these records have been singularly preserved in the vicissitudes of transmission across the centuries, from the introduction of later, unhomogeneous material, and the like. To the Greeks of the ages succeeding the appearance of these epics they were a whole literature and law. 1 They came under the strong sanction of custom and religion ; they embodied the philosophy of living which had commended itself to the experience of older and therefore wiser generations. They were cosmography, history, genealogy, geography, law, morals, and all the rest, to the later Greek. Changing of the text of such documents would not easily be tolerated ; the trifling interpolations asserted by some Homeric critics affect in no way the genuine character of the whole. And, even though certain parts of Homer may be philologically regarded as earlier or later than others, from the
1 Cf, R. C. JEBB, Introduction to Homer (Boston, 1887), chap. iii.
